


past the last exit

by xandrillia



Category: The Locked Tomb Trilogy | Gideon the Ninth Series - Tamsyn Muir
Genre: Alternate Universe - Modern Setting, Apocalypse, F/F, Griddlehark, Post-Apocalypse, Swearing
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2021-02-14
Updated: 2021-02-14
Packaged: 2021-03-12 17:13:25
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 10,993
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/29139087
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/xandrillia/pseuds/xandrillia
Summary: See, it went like this— friends saidlet’s get coffee, let’s meet up,andtext when you’re in town, okay?Friends made agreements, and then they up and left and moved on with a glance over their shoulder, and they wondered, and sometimes they paused, but they left, and the leaving was all that mattered.Harrow saidI hate you, you’ve ruined me,anddon’t you dare assume you’re worthy.She made a promise to never look back, to always let go, but Gideon returned and didn’t wonder, didn’t pause, just sought, and the searching was all that mattered, but Harrow didn't know what to do with that.or: post apocalypse, but quiet
Relationships: Gideon Nav & Harrowhark Nonagesimus, Gideon Nav/Harrowhark Nonagesimus
Comments: 12
Kudos: 37
Collections: whispering woods library valentines day fic exchange





	past the last exit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nuttyshake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nuttyshake/gifts).



> happy valentine’s day!! this is for ludo for the whispering woods library fic exchange, whose prompt was the first quote with apocalypse! i had a lot of fun writing this, i hope u like it!! :)
> 
> title from the mountain goats’ "no children" (aka the hand in unlovable hand song)

_“Dear Milena,_

_I wish the world were ending tomorrow. Then I could take the next train, arrive at your doorstep in Vienna, and say: “Come with me, Milena. We are going to love each other without scruples or fear or restraint. Because the world is ending tomorrow.” Perhaps we don’t love unreasonably because we think we have time, or have to reckon with time. But what if we don’t have time? Or what if time, as we know it, is irrelevant? Ah, if only the world were ending tomorrow. We could help each other very much.”_

_― Franz Kafka_

_“I didn't fall in love with you. I walked into love with you, with my eyes wide open, choosing to take every step along the way. I do believe in fate and destiny, but I also believe we are only fated to do the things that we'd choose anyway. And I'd choose you; in a hundred lifetimes, in a hundred worlds, in any version of reality, I'd find you and I'd choose you”_

_― Kiersten White, The Chaos of Stars_

_“Can you believe in guides your eyes can’t see  
_ _can you believe I still want you  
_ _I cannot believe you would choose loneliness  
_ _loneliness is how little you want me.”_

_― Melissa Broder, Scarecrone_

* * *

Sometimes, people grow apart. That’s fine— it’s normal, and expected, and even though it hurts, it’s allowed. When this happens, you can mourn and you can wonder what would have been, but ultimately, you can set down your hurt, lift your chin, and leave it behind.

Sometimes, people are torn apart. These people— the friends, the lovers, and the enemies you can’t live without— they take something with them when they leave. Something jagged and broken, leaving you hollow and afraid. On your knees, hand over your heart, pain flowing steady through the cracks they left behind.

And sometimes, people leave you.

The worst— and the last of this loneliness— is this. It’s need. It’s longing. It’s desire and curiosity and some base instinct reaching a clawed hand up from inside you, dredging up the deepest bits of something you’d only ever dreamed of holding, cruel pleasure in the panic of the search. It flows steady through your veins, the slow beat of your heart fueling whatever fire might burn inside you, pushing you up, forward, on to the next day. It’s unnamed and more powerful for being so, and when it’s taken into someone’s hands, that’s when you’ll first feel fear.

The drop in your stomach, the dull gleam of their eyes and curl of their lip. Wanting to cup your hands around theirs, to hide your heart from scrutinizing eyes. Fear is the agonizing wait as you watch them study your pain in their hands, fingers seizing over it.

Someone will hold your heart, blood pulsing between their fingers, life and love and loathe and revenge, pure, thick red lines tracing over their wrists, down their forearms, falling silently to the floor beneath their feet. You will want to say _please,_ and you will want to say _careful,_ to beg for your heart’s safety and trust in their judgment.

You will lick your lips to speak, and when you do, they will look you in the eye, raise their chin, and drop it.

That’s the worst loneliness, really— how little they want you.

A year after the apocalypse started— and three months after it ended, ash in its wake and silent skies, cities abandoned palaces and deep footprints marking every corner of the world— Gideon Nav took a trip. She’d been thinking of Harrow one day— for some odd reason she could neither defend nor justify, because what the fuck— and decided to find her. So Gideon looked at her to-do list, and she looked at the newest addition on the bottom line, somewhere under ‘become sword lesbian’ and ‘defeat Cam in battle for eternal bragging rights.’ She got out a marker and checked off the box in thick black ink, capped the marker, left. She packed what she thought would be fun, and then what she needed when Camilla raised an eyebrow and told her she’d be eaten by wolves. _There aren’t any wolves in Ohio, Cam,_ Gideon had said, and Cam said she sounded like Palamedes, which effectively shut her up.

She walked a ways, and talked to a lot of people. Some were friendly. Some weren’t. The ones she managed to hold a conversation with always asked for stories, and she gave what parts of hers she didn’t mind sharing. Sometimes she told them why she was walking, and sometimes they wished her luck. She wasn’t really sure what to do with that, as she didn’t expect much to come of her travels, but she said thanks anyway and moved on.

When Gideon finally made it to the two story farmhouse on the outskirts of a city she’d spent half a gleaming life in, she walked across the cracked dirt out front, up the creaking porch, chopped blue pain and white trim peeling away in the summer heat, and knocked on the front door. She looked over her shoulder as she waited, squinting through dark sunglasses at the yard beyond; no green grass or lush garden, hot wind slithering through whispering fields of papery crops, the taste of dust and chalk singeing the air. No water, no reprieve, everything drained and dry and drying. It was unlivable. A light flicked on inside.

There was a shuffling, and a pause. The door opened.

Harrowhark glared at Gideon. She looked the same as she did three weeks before the apocalypse began, which was the last time Gideon had seen her. Narrow shoulders, pinched face, and dark circles under her eyes; nails bitten to the quick where they curled around the doorframe. She stared at Gideon, unblinking, and deadpanned through the screen door between them: “I hate you, Gideon Nav.”

She closed the door.

That was fair.

See, Gideon and Harrow hadn’t been friends, before this. Or even acquaintances. Or associates, or anything, really, but rivals and a pain in the other’s ass. It was fine like that, in the before— Gideon suffered Harrow’s existence through elementary and middle and high school and eventually into college, and then they worked in the same city and Gideon saw her every Tuesday morning in the same corner store coffee shop by her work where she always ordered the same venti cold brew with three espresso shots. She would glare at Gideon from under smudged eyeshadow and blurred eyeliner, should she deign to look her way, painted black nails tightening around her drink like she was trying to strangle it instead of her.

It was like this— friends said _let’s get coffee, let’s meet up,_ and _text when you’re in town, okay?_ Friends made agreements, and then they up and left and moved on with a glance over their shoulder, and they wondered, and sometimes they paused, but they left, and the leaving was all that mattered.

Harrow said _I hate you, you’ve ruined me,_ and _don’t you dare assume you’re worthy._ She made a promise to never look back, to always let go, but Gideon returned and didn’t wonder, didn’t pause, just sought, and the searching was all that mattered.

So, no, they hadn’t been friends before this, and yes, it was fair of Harrow to leave Gideon in the dust— better than _fine,_ it was expected. Harrow didn’t owe Gideon anything, or so she would tell herself: it was Gideon who had decided to visit her old nemesis. It was Gideon who had travelled across the bland, dusty state of Ohio to find her. It was Gideon who had split them up in the first place, and who had ignored everything Harrow told her on that day and came _back._

It was fine. It was normal, and expected and accepted because people grew apart, and it wasn’t fine but it would be, and when Harrow stood with the shards of her own heart at her feet, she never challenged who had dropped the pieces.

So when Harrow left Gideon out on the porch in the hot summer evening, everything dry and disgusting and painfully out in the open, Gideon turned around, sat on the steps, and decided she would wait there for a bit. It was the apocalypse, after all. Not much else going on. So she stayed.

It took three days for Harrow to open the door again.

That was fine. Gideon was prepared for long stretches of boredom, as bad as she was at sitting still. She’d travelled pretty damn far, if you asked her, though others would say it was a moderate distance at most, and was somewhat used to silence. She had food. She had water, and magazines, and some shitty weed she traded off of a questionable fellow a few days back. She was bored, and when Harrow opened the door, Gideon hoped that she’d at least get some free entertainment.

“You smell like shit,” Harrow said. Warm light spilled from the house behind her, silhouetting her in the doorframe, along with something that smelled suspiciously like _stew_. She was dressed like a teenager from 2007. Honestly, not even worth describing. Gideon thought she looked better than would be expected in the apocalypse, which was saying something, and that something was maybe prettier than she'd realized before. She looked like she just got off a double night shift at a Chuck E. Cheese arcade.

“How are you on this fine evening, m’lady?” Gideon drawled, because she was— oops— a little high.

“I hate you. Get off my porch. You smell like shit.” Harrow delivered each of these in a monotone voice, completely factual (which Gideon figured she deserved, as most places didn’t have working showers and she’d left her place some two and a half weeks ago), the period at the end of each statement a bullet headed aimed for Gideon’s head. She stuck out her tongue. Harrow slammed the door. Her footsteps creaked all the way up the stairs, and Gideon went back to her stargazing.

The thing was, Harrow kind of hated Gideon. Just a little. Or a lot, depending on the day. Maybe the word she was looking for was resentment. So when Gideon showed up on her porch out of nowhere, she was pissed and annoyed and wanted to punch something, and not punching Gideon in her stupid face and breaking those damn sunglasses Harrow had gotten her in high school took a lot more energy than she would have expected.

Harrow was tired, in those days, and seeing her old— not _friend,_ exactly, but something opposite to it where Harrow knew every single thing about Gideon and hated that knowledge with her entire being, but hating Gideon was so much a part of Harrow that she didn’t know who she was without that anger, so they were more than friends in that Harrow would be incomplete without her— sparked some energy in Harrow that she hadn’t known she still possessed.

It was nice, she thought, to be wanted.

Then she punched that thought instead of Gideon and crammed it in a drawer in the back of her mind, locked it shut, threw it in a river headed for the deepest ocean she could imagine, and vowed only to ever think of deserts.

Somehow, Gideon ended up in the kitchen. Harrow let her in, or she let herself in, but neither would say which. Harrow stood at the counter, trying to open a jar of strawberry jelly. Gideon sat at the table, watching and tapping a butter knife against faded wood. The clock in the entryway ticked loudly, countering the low _tap tap tap_ on the table. Gideon resisted the urge to carve something into its surface, knowing her visit was already far overstayed as she shouldn’t have even gone there in the first place.

 _One-tick-two-tick-three-tick-four._ Harrow’s shoulders tensed. _One-two-tick-three-four-tick-five-six-tick-seven._ Her hands slipped on the lid.

_Tick. Tick. Tick. Tick._

Gideon puffed out her cheeks, bored. Harrow straightened, and before Gideon could come up with another pattern, Harrow turned and threw the jar at Gideon’s head. She ducked.

The jar hit the wall with a thud, denting the drywall, and shattered on the floor with a surprisingly quiet _crack_ and clatter of broken glass. When Gideon got over her surprise and turned to ask Harrow what the fuck that was about, she was gone, door swinging shut behind her. Gideon looked from the half-made sandwich on the counter to the glass-riddled jam seeping across the floor and helped herself to leftover pizza in the fridge.

They got used to it, somehow. They didn’t talk, and didn’t really even acknowledge the other— it was more like each simply tolerated the other’s existence, which was strange because everything before this was focused on everything bright and bold and painful, no matter whether it was important or not. They just sort of avoided each other, even though Gideon slept on the couch in the living room and Harrow had to walk past her to the stairs when she wanted to get to her own room on the second floor.

A few days after Harrow shut her out and three less after she let her in, Gideon was gone from the living room before the sun had even risen. Harrow found her fixing the pantry door.

“It fucking squeaked, Harrow. My headache’s like a spike through my head,” she said.

“Fuck you,” Harrow replied, and left without breakfast.

The next day, Harrow left the farm. Gideon didn’t notice her leaving until midmorning when her footsteps hadn’t yet slammed down the stairs like she was trying to tear the entire house apart under herself, and went to investigate.

“Nonagesimus?” Gideon called from the bottom of the stairs. She’d never gone up to the second floor before, and didn’t want to. Who knew what weird shit she kept up there— weapons, bodies, spellbooks on how to rid herself of unwelcome guests or other sacreligious shit Gideon didn’t want detailed.

“Nonagesimus!” she shouted in the middle of the yard, both a little annoyed and maybe kind of worried, because, once again: this _was_ the apocalypse. She turned around, squinting in the sunlight, and there was Harrow against the horizon, a tiny figure some mile and a half away pushing an empty shopping cart down the middle of the highway with steadfast determination. She was decked out in her finest tattered black winter gear, and Gideon could imagine the squeaky wheels even from that distance.

“What the fuck?” Gideon said aloud, and ran after her.

The city was a wreck.

They all were, but this one was even more decrepit than usual, black smoke rising in the distance, hazy clouds dark with acrid smog hanging low in the sky. Cars blocked the streets, some with bodies inside, others empty, doors unlocked with the keys placed neatly on the seats or dangling from the ignition. Their gas tanks would be long empty, but Gideon wondered sometimes if she’d ever find one with enough fuel to get moving again. She wanted to know if she’d ever fly down a deserted highway again like she did in the days before, just to do anything other than amble along this world at the slowest pace she’d ever had the displeasure of taking.

“What happened?” Gideon asked, because the fires should’ve burned away long ago. Harrow’s glare hardened. Her hands tightened around the cart’s handle. She kept walking.

Gideon trailed behind her, looking through shattered storefront windows and ducking into lobbies, taking only the briefest looks so she might keep up with Harrow’s brisk pace. She walked with extreme purpose down the center of what would’ve been one of the city’s main streets, four lanes cutting down the heart of it. The place would’ve been bustling with activity, a world away and a lifetime ago, but only litter travelled it now, trailing across the ground, hanging from long-dead power lines on the edges of the city, the sound of plastic dragging on asphalt cutting itself on shattered glass. Gideon stepped over the trash in the gutters, past raided suitcases torn from looted cars. Despite the midday sun overhead, she shivered, empty windows overhead like eyes peering down on her. She flipped off a particularly ominous storefront before jogging to catch up with Harrow.

“I wouldn’t go in there if I were you,” Gideon warned three blocks later. They’d stopped outside a residential building, apartments overlooking the dusty crop fields to the south, smog-coated skyline to the north. Harrow took a backpack from the cart and slung it over her shoulders. She didn’t bother to roll her eyes, as her contempt for Gideon radiated off of her in waves so fiercely that Gideon felt as if she needed to take a seat.

“I have raided this store every Wednesday for the last two and a half, Gideon, and haven’t once ran into a problem bigger than what I can handle, and I, unfortunately, had the displeasure of growing up with _you._ I know what I’m doing.”

“It used to be Tuesdays,” she said, ignoring the ‘and a half’ that put her calculations a bit further back than what was strictly legal.

“No, idiot, Wednesdays,” Harrow corrected. She pulled a pair of gloves onto her hands from the side pocket of her bag, thin leather fitted perfectly to lithe fingers. “Tuesdays were the only day of which my schedule wasn’t fit to avoid you. Now are you doing this, or not?”

That stung, unfortunately. Gideon shrugged it off. Harrow adjusted the straps on the backpack and turned away. The stupid thing didn’t let go of Gideon, but dug its barb deeper under her skin.

“I’ll stay,” Gideon said to Harrow’s retreating back. She was rewarded with no response but Harrow’s boots on the stairs— and she must have been climbing all the way to the top, some fourteen floors, at least— and light wind brushing through the lobby’s high ceilings. Faded wallpaper decorated the walls, yellow lines twisting and turning in an array of lines, patterns trailing off before ever completing themselves. Gideon kicked a book on the floor. She walked around the big oak desk and drummed her hands on the counter. She explored the lobbies on either side of the building’s, burning time, both as boring as the first. She sat on the floor and stared at the ceiling, stained innumerous colors and designs. She sighed, and took the stairs.

Harrow was kneeling next to a small garden bed and stabbing a trowel into the dirt when Gideon closed the door behind her. She had her back to Gideon and didn’t look up when she appeared, the sound of the door clanging shut across the rooftop startlingly loud. Gideon approached casually, trailing around the edge of the rooftop, hands in pockets and whistling idly. Harrow didn’t bother to keep the scowl off of her face and turned back to her project.

Gideon wandered a moment more, pacing the perimeter of the roof. The streets below looked less cluttered from afar, cars strewn through the streets like some kid had forgotten to put away their legos, sky above smeared orange at the horizon, long shadows across the rooftop skewing her and Harrow’s shadows.

“What are you doing?” Gideon asked, somewhere between being genuinely curious and wanting to annoy her. Harrow ignored her. She buried the shovel in the dirt and started carving out rows with her hands, dirt spilling over her wrists and forearms.

“Those are a bit close,” Gideon commented, because they were.

“I neither ask for nor require your assistance,” Harrow snapped. Her hair whipped across her face, blown by sharp winds across the roof. Gideon considered moving it out of her eyes, as her hands were full, but decided she liked her life, as rotten as it was at the moment.

“It’s the 21st century, Harrow. No one says ‘nor’ anymore.”

“Then I must be no one to you.”

Gideon sat down on the other side of the bed, elbows on her knees, hands clasped loosely. Harrow watched warily. Gideon smiled and wiggled her eyebrows behind her sunglasses. “Has anyone ever told you you’re stunning?”

Harrow stared at her, face blank. The moment stretched on long enough that Gideon began to get uncomfortable, but before she broke the silence with something probably much worse, Harrow sat back on her heels and shoved her hair out of her face, gloved fingertips smearing dirt across her skin.

“What do you want?”

Gideon shrugged. “I dunno.” She pressed her hands into the dirt, surprisingly rich given the sun-baked state of everything else she’d so far encountered. “To stay here for a bit, I guess.”

Harrow narrowed her eyes, unused to a display of anything other than sarcasm and ire.

“No,” she said decisively after a moment’s pause.

“What?”

“You cannot stay.”

Gideon’s light expression dropped. “The fuck? Why?”

“Because I am alone, Gideon,” Harrow pronounced. She rested her hands on the edge of the garden bed, raising her chin. “I forever have been, and forever shall be, alone in my own world. You have no part here.”

“God, here we go.”

“I travel a path known only to me by my own feet and by those as lost as I. You walked alongside me, a lifetime ago—”

“Jesus, Harrow, laying it on thick today.”

“—but have since left me behind. I do not know when you deviated or where to, but the solace I might have once taken in your companion shriveled years ago.” Harrow stabbed the shovel into the dirt and peeled off her gloves. Dirt lined open wounds on her hands, cracked and split by the arid climate, dehydration, and overwork, none of which Gideon supposed were in her control. “So, no. You cannot stay with me. I cannot accept you into my life, as you have already lost your chance. Once we walked a similar path, and we might have—” she paused a moment, considering her next words. Her face twisted in disgust, her lip curled, and it looked for a moment as if she might throw up on the neat rows before her. “We might have _understood_ each other,” she managed, “but I have travelled far past the last exit; you made your mistake long before I knew the chance was mine to take, and longer still after my opportunity arose.” Harrow threw her gloves in the dirt and sat next to the bed, hard eyes on the horizon. Gold reflected in her dark eyes, orange sun sitting deep in the sky burnishing her dark skin like polished copper. She looked like she would sit there forever, brooding, until Gideon raised an eyebrow and spoke.

“Okay,” Gideon said. “So cut through the woods.”

Harrow blanched.

“I— what?”

“You’re on a path, right?” Gideon moved to kneel next to the dirt, adjusting her sunglasses and gesturing to the row Harrow had dug. Harrow frowned and followed her gaze, holding one hand up to shade the setting sun from her eyes. Her hair brushed her shoulders, falling from where she’d tucked it behind her ear as she nodded, longer than she would have normally worn it. Eyes red-rimmed and skin smudged with dirt, she looked so drastically different from any version of herself that Gideon had ever known that she almost stopped herself before speaking, but this was _Harrow._ Gideon didn’t mind that she was different, and didn’t hope for anyone else. Harrow might have thought she was alone, but Gideon would find her across a hundred lifetimes and a hundred realities; she would choose her in each.

“Okay. So just step off. Leave. You don’t have to keep walking.”

“It’s not that easy,” Harrow countered. She flexed her hand, watching dirt-rimmed cuts shift, opening on red.

“Hang a left. Or a right. Or turn around— hell, just sit down, Harrow. Let someone catch up to you.”

“No one’s coming. It doesn’t work like that, Griddle.”

“They might be, and it does, anyway,” she pushed back. Gideon took off her glasses, passing them over her hands and into her pocket. “Nothing matters anymore. Before this, yeah, shit was unreasonable. It mattered and had to make sense or whatever— I get that, Harrow, I really do— but the world ended a year ago and we’re just in the ruins. We don’t have time to exist unreasonably, because we’re out of time. It’s over. Get off the path.”

Harrow stood up. She brushed her hands off on her jeans and looked at Gideon. She looked at Gideon, and Gideon looked at her, and she said:

“I am not as brave as you believe me to be.”

The sun had set by the time they started back. Gideon was the first to notice the danger.

“Six o’clock,” she said quietly, keeping pace with Harrow and their squeaky shopping cart. Gideon wondered if she’d chosen today on purpose to go into the city— the moon hung bright in the night sky, moon and starlight both lighting the streets in a soft silver filter. They’d started up one side of an arched bridge when she spoke, the riverbed that had once split the city allowing space between packed city streets for clear skies overhead. The bed was only dust, now, bare bones and a seventy foot drop at its peak, the river’s rushing currents only a memory.

“It’s far past ten, you insolent slug.”

“I _mean,”_ Gideon clarified, rolling her eyes and for a moment pushing away the prospect of a fight and the prickling knowledge that they were being watched, “there’s someone behind us. About a block back— maybe two or three of them, I’m not sure.”

“So?”

 _“So,_ we’re moving a cart full of supplies and a shit ton of rations that literally anyone would want?”

Harrow sighed, keeping pace. “If you’re so worried about it, take care of it yourself. Now shut up, and walk.”

They made it fifteen more feet before trouble arose.

“Shit,” Gideon muttered. Before them, at the base of the bridge, a man climbed out of the street from under a manhole cover. He rose on shaking lings, stumbling a moment before steadying, eyes tunnelling on the cart Harrow led. He broke into a toothy grin under a wispy white beard, the same puffy clouds around his head making him look like he’d been shocked. Gideon didn’t buy the look— that cover must’ve been at least two hundred pounds, and he’d barely strained against its weight.

“Mine,” he muttered, nasally voice echoing through empty night streets to them. “Give it, give it, mine mine mine.” He laughed, high and bright, pinching his fingers together like a crab, and stepped forward.

“I told you,” Gideon hissed. Harrow had stopped walking— Gideon grabbed the side of the card and shifted through the contents. Harrow hadn’t brought a single thing to defend themselves with, unless you count a fucking trowel. Gideon cursed and dropped it, looking up to the man. He inched forward slowly, fingers tapping together.

“We’re not looking for trouble,” Gideon called, even though Harrow was already to pick a fight should someone offer the chance (which was every situation she encountered), and Gideon didn’t mind a few hits herself— giving or taking didn’t matter, as long as the adrenaline was there. The man licked his lips.

“Mine,” he repeated.

“Fuck you,” Gideon called, and beside her, Harrow disappeared.

It was too quick a motion for Gideon to follow— Harrow was there, hands on the cart and feet on the ground, glaring her worst at the man— and then she wasn’t, four hands on her arms and backpack yanking her down the street, sprinting with Harrow between them.

Gideon looked at Harrow, who hadn’t even shouted. She looked at the cart, filled with what was probably their survival— rations and gardening tools Harrow had probably killed people for— and the man in the street. He laughed. Gideon swore, and ran after Harrow.

She was doing okay, even though the people who had grabbed her were both easily twice her size. They had stopped a quarter way down the bridge, a man on his hands and knees a few feet away from Harrow and a burly woman, holding his stomach and dry heaving. Harrow, on the ground, rolled ungracefully away from him and turned to her other attacker, a woman with dirty blonde hair trying to get Harrow to stay _still,_ which Gideon knew was futile because Harrow was as quick as a rat when she wanted to be. The woman basically fell on her in an attempt to pin her down, which was unfortunate as Harrow had just pulled back to deliver the most _massive_ kick Gideon had ever seen in her entire life, and she used to take martial arts classes at a studio full of some of the strongest women she’d ever seen. But to hell with all that, apparently, because the moment Harrow’s boot connected with her nose, the woman’s head snapped back and she shrieked, letting go to cup her face in her hands, propelling backwards. She fell in the street, blood pouring from her nose.

“My eyes!” she wailed. “My eyes!”

Harrow scrambled to her feet, caught off-balance by her backpack swinging off of one shoulder, breathing heavily and backing away from the woman, who continued to wail about her eyes and clutch her nose as Harrow steadied herself, one hand on the bridge’s banister, which crumbled into the ravine below a few feet from where she stood.

“Shit,” Gideon swore, seeing Harrow standing fine on her own, her attackers momentarily incapacitated, and spun around. Behind her, the street was entirely clear. Their cart sat in the middle of the street, and Gideon swore again when she was it was almost entirely empty. Why the man hadn’t taken it she didn’t know, but her priorities began and ended with the knowledge that Harrow had tracked her line of sight. Gideon looked back to her, itching for a fight and knowing instead she was about to get her ass kicked by a prissy 25 year old who acted with all the menace of a middle schooler. Gideon should not have been afraid of her, but she did have to admit that Harrow was _slightly_ intimidating when she wanted to be, as unexpected as it might have been.

For a moment, Harrow was very, very, still. Even the attackers seemed to sense her anger, one backing down the street having got what they needed.

“Gideon Nav, you have damned us.”

“Wh— me? They were kidnapping _you!”_

Harrow stomped her foot on the ground like a kid throwing a tantrum and turned to face Gideon, eyes dark with fury and entire body shaking. Gideon had forgotten how painfully cold it was to be on the receiving end of Harrow’s burning anger.

“It was clearly a distraction!” she shouted. “You fucker! I had it! I hate you! I had it entirely under control!”

Gideon spread her hands in disbelief. “What was I supposed to do? Let them take you?”

“If that’s what survival means, yes!”

Gideon’s eyes narrowed. Harrow took a breath to continue her tirade, and in that pause, the woman attacked. Her companion had fled long ago, but she saw something to earn in winning this fight, though it only occurred to Gideon later that they and the scraggly man across the street might not have been cooperating. She shoved her palm roughly between Harrow’s shoulder blades, sending her to the pavement, and stepped over her to swing towards Gideon.

Her opponent stepped forward, blood dripping down her chin, trailing down her knuckles and winding across her wrists, falling to the pavement below. She looked fierce, like something had broken inside her long ago and she’d bloodied her hands on the shards every day after, grinding it to dust, just to be able to look every challenge in the eye and say _I am stronger than you think._

Gideon got her fists up and wondered just how strong her opponent was.

Everything cut out. The moon could have blinked away its light, the bridge could have collapsed, and Harrow could have said a thousand things Gideon never wanted to hear, and none of it would have broken past the barrier she threw up against it all. The woman caught her forearm and pulled Gideon forward, intending to headbut her. She got her hand up between them— palm to the woman’s nose in what Gideon imagined would have been an explosion of pain.

The woman cursed and tightened her grip, fingers digging into Gideon’s arm. Gideon punched left. Her knuckles landed on her jaw, knocking her teeth together with a _crack._ She backed up, putting space between them. Before she could even think about her next move, the woman lunged forward as if to tackle her— Gideon braced for the impact, knowing taking a direct hit was stupid as fuck and dangerous, but the woman had pushed her off balance long enough that Gideon was beginning to lose— and feinted. She twisted to the side, darting under Gideon’s guard, and shouldered her in the ribs with a huff of annoyed breath. Gideon drove her elbow into the woman’s back, but it was too late— too little and too late and far too stupid— Gideon realized the woman had backed her up against the railing. The crumbling railing, leading to a fifteen foot drop, dirt and dust at the bottom. She grunted. The woman’s feet slipped over dust and crumbling stone, and the woman gasped, catching herself. Too little and too late, because when Harrow screamed, she was already falling.

The woman ran, thankfully. She gave Harrow one look before darting, shoving a hand across her face to clear away flowing blood, and her footsteps disappeared into the night. Harrow’s eyes stayed locked on the empty space at the edge of the bridge. Her breathing was jagged and broken, hand pressed over her chest to slow the pain there, something hollow and afraid seeping through the cracks stretching and threatening to shatter should something more touch them.

Harrow half fell down the bank, bloodying her hands on the rocks in her desperate descent. In the shadow of the bridge, hidden from moonlight, she stumbles toward Gideon, wide eyes searching. Harrow found her laying on her back and staring at the sky. She’d fallen further than Harrow feared, but the deep water that had run through there ages ago had taken rocks with it, leaving smooth, hard-packed dirt, cool in the night.

“Get up,” Harrow said, voice empty as she shook Gideon’s shoulders. She knelt at her side, leaning over her and blocking her view of the night sky. Gideon didn’t respond verbally but moved her hand, floating by Harrow’s face, and huffed out a pained breath. Harrow hit her hand away, then realized she was trying to sit up and helped her.

“Cool it, Nonagesimus,” Gideon said after a moment. She untangled Harrow’s hands from where they were clenched in her shirt, the words barely registering over blood pounding in her ears. Gideon’s eyes were glassy, dark in the shadow of the bridge.

“You fell,” Harrow said, dully, accusatorily. The blood rushing in her ears made it hard to hear, and it took a moment for Gideon’s response to register—

“I know.”

—before she was pulling herself to her feet, touching red in her hair, more than its normal bright orange, and telling Harrow to get up, keep moving, “Up and at ‘em, sweetcakes, let’s go.”

They climbed back up to the bridge together, each casting wary looks to the other when the first wasn’t looking. Gideon sat for a moment at the edge of the bridge, catching her breath before following Harrow. She was limping, her knee twisted. She’d hurt something when the woman pushed her to the ground, and her head spun, the stars above her smearing into jagged lines of light.

“Get in.” Gideon nodded to the cart. She flicked her fingers toward the ground, blood black against the pavement. Harrow straightened, indignant, determined to make the four miles back to the house on her own.

“I can walk on my own,” she protested.

“Harrow?”

“What?”

Gideon took Harrow’s face in her hands, thumbs brushing her cheeks. Harrow’s eyes widened. Gideon looked at her straight-on, those stupid sunglasses in her pocket for once instaed of hiding golden-amber sunlight that Harrow had grown up with and missed too much to ever acknowledge, warm amber even in the moon’s pale light, the color of sunset over the ocean, desert whipped by whistling winds, honey crystallized in a perfect moment of sunlight, and said: “Get in the fucking cart.”

“Next time we bring a fucking sword or some shit, okay?”

“It was ten feet. You simply have the pain tolerance of a newborn.”

“Twenty, and _you’re_ the one who needed stitches, asshat.”

Gideon was laying on her back in the yard when Harrow stomped down the front porch stairs, furious. She was barefoot, sleeves were rolled to her elbows, hands covered in what looked like tomato, hair tied half-up out of red-rimmed eyes— they’d come back from the gardens the night before with more food than they knew what to do with, and Harrow had kicked Gideon out of the house before the sun had even risen so she could can what she could and freeze the rest on her own. Gideon didn’t know where she’d learned to do that— there was more time between them than she cared to think about, a littler duller than all the other time she recalled so easily— but she’d given Harrow her space. Their last few trips into the city had gone much easier than their first disastrous attempt a few weeks back, though Gideon still didn’t care for the eerie stillness of the city. The stitches crossing the dark line on Harrow’s chin reminded her to be cautious, though, and they were used to arming themselves whenever they visited.

Harrow stormed past Gideon, nearly plowing her down in her haste. Gideon had never really given it much thought, but there was a barn at the edge of Harrow’s property, massive and caving in on itself, red paint chipped and faded brown under the relentless sun. Just looking at it practically gave her splinters, which was why Gideon had never explored further than the main floor, stepping into the shadowed doorway, watching filtered light shift slowly over crushed brown hay on dirt floors, dust coated thick on every surface.

Harrow shoved the door open with her shoulder, then, opening it with a _crack_ and visible shifting to the already shaky structure. Because Gideon had nothing better to do, she followed, careful not to touch the frame when she slipped through the doorway. It was darker inside than it’d been when she was there last, slate gray sky overhead making the shadowless space seem at once far too large and closing in on itself, winter testing its welcome. Harrow crossed to the far side of the space, kicking up whorls of dirt in her wake, and settled her hands on a rough wooden ladder leading to the loft, which Gideon hadn’t risked on her previous trip. Gideon tested the latter with a firm shake after Harrow disappeared overhead— seemed okay— and followed her up, each step creaking.

Hay covered wooden slat floors, pale and faded, smelling of dirt and something sweeter she couldn’t place. Gideon imagined they’d been arranged in fluffy piles, once, but now it was flat and dirty and matted to the floor by small footprints, sticking out of Harrow’s socks, pink and green. The green one had a christmas tree on it.

“What are you doing?” Gideon asked, still on the ladder, one hand on the edge of the floor where it was cut away like a trapdoor. Harrow was crouched by a chest on the floor, digging through its contents. She reached inside and pulled out something bundled in dark blue cloth, standing and kicking the chest’s lid shut with a _crack._ She turned away from Gideon and descended one-handed down a ladder on the other side of the loft that Gideon hadn’t noticed before, clutching the water bottle-sized thing to her chest.

Three targets stood posted on wooden rods behind the barn a hundred feet from where Harrow set down the bundle in the grass. Harrow unwrapped the bundle and tucked something into her pocket. Kicking the cloth aside, Harrow stood, lifting her chin and turning to the targets. She held a handgun, dark metal gleaming dully in the low light from the slate sky above. Gideon slowed to a stop, watching.

Harrow planted her feet— and she had good form, which Gideon knew because she’d been the one who had taught her to shoot, back in high school when they were both bored out of their minds and looking for literally anything to do other than what was expected of them, and no one wondered where they’d gone anyway— and aimed. She was always still as stone when she shot, opposed to Gideon readjusting constantly, jittery energy and trying to find the best angle for the shot. She did like to do things right, though Harrow always made fun of her for her shifting.

Gideon crossed her arms, marking the line of Harrow’s shoulders, the way one foot was set slightly back to brace herself for the kick. Her hands folded over the handle, one finger on the trigger. Wrists, elbows, and shoulders in line, back straight and chin tucked, glaring down the barrel at the target. The moment froze in place, early autumn mist curling around her ankles, pre-dawn light softening her cheeks, glancing off of the planes of her bare forearms. She exhaled slowly, loose strands of her hair fluttering against her breath. Harrow pulled the trigger, and the moment shattered.

The target didn’t stand a chance. Harrow only had the patience for things she was already somewhat good at and built on those strengths in favor of spreading the wealth to other rusty skills, and it was clear that this was no exception. One, two, three, four, fix, six, cleanly through the center of the flimsy target. The hole widened with each shot, but barely, so even was her aim. She dropped the clip and took another from her back pocket. The _shtick_ and _click_ s echoed across the empty field, reaching to the infinite sky above, empty and clear, slate gray turning to pale blue as Gideon waited. With a final _crack_ of plastic snapping to meet metal, Harrow took aim and fired again. One, two, three, four five six. The noise ricocheted around the farm, bouncing in Gideon’s head before dissipating, echoes dispersing in the cloudless sky high above. The world stilled around them. Harrow blinked at the target, entirely a mess now that the second clip hadn’t hit the bullseye once.

“Shit, Harrow,” Gideon said. A piece of the target fell from the corner to the grass. Harrow tracked the movement and her form dissolved like dominos down the stairs, first her hands uncurling from the grip, then dropping her arms and taking a stilted half-step back to turn, one hand fumbling for the second and last clip in her other back pocket. Her gaze snapped to Gideon, and her eyes were frightening, then, wide and fever-bright and both looking straight through Gideon to the barn behind her and tearing down everything she’d built up around herself to keep people like Harrow _out._ It didn’t work, of course, as Harrow had been by her side since before she even thought to protect herself like that, but they at least pretended those walls were there, and everything was far too raw when laid exposed under Harrow’s gaze like a stripped wire, electricity striving to shock anyone who got too close.

Harrow loaded the gun and checked it, fingers flicking over the gun, and lifted it, taking steady aim. Harrow exhaled slowly, fingers flexing on the grip.

“Target’s over there,” Gideon said slowly, one eyebrow raised. Harrow stared down the barrel of the gun, pointed directly at her, and dared her to take another fucking step.

Gideon kept her mouth shut, genuinely curious and also mildly alarmed, because, well. This _was_ Harrow she was dealing with, and years of unexpectedness should have gotten Gideon used to anything, but this was a level she’d yet to see. Still, she waited for Harrow to make whatever decision she was headed for, because honestly, her chances were a shit-ton worse if she spoke.

Harrow threw the gun at the ground. It fired, bullet whizzing past the house. Gideon jumped.

“I hate you! I hate you, and I cannot fathom why you must haunt me in this way. Have I done nothing to deserve of this pain you’re inflicting upon me with your presence? Did I not repent for my actions? Did I not _tell you to leave me?”_

Gideon considered it. She liked the idea that her presence was an annoyance to Harrow, because that was fun, but it was the last question that had her pause, lowering her hands.

“I mean, yeah,” she said with a shrug. She put her hands in her pockets. “But when have I ever listened to you?”

Harrow stared at her, breathing heavily with the effort of her rant. Gideon stared back. Harrow pointed at her, and hissed, “you don’t decide what’s good for me.” She picked up the gun off the ground, and fired once more. This one hit the upper barn window, glass shattering in a spray of rainbow light, falling unceremoniously to the ground.

“Harrow,” Gideon said slowly, smiling. “Are you a hot farm chick?”

She shot her.

(Okay, not really, but it was close and Gideon’s life flashed before her eyes and she really needs to beat Cam in that fight, still, and hasn’t told Palamedes nearly enough times how much of a dick he is.)

Gideon was asleep on the couch. Harrow took the stairs slowly, careful to avoid the steps that creaked. She drifted across the cold wooden floors like a ghost, socked feet quiet on the floors, blanket trailing from her shoulders and collecting dust behind her.

“Griddle,” she whispered. Gideon didn’t move. Harrow repeated her name, and when she didn’t react again, reached out one hand from under the warm safety of her blanket.

“Are you…” Harrow frowned. She brushed her fingers through Gideon’s hair, just to be sure. It was soft. That confirmed it: she was real. _This_ was real, and Gideon Nav of 106 S Ninth Avenue Orphanage— the same one Harrow hailed from, unfortunately enough— had travelled several hundred miles most certainly by foot through endless wasteland looking for Harrow when she had no reason to believe her alive, or in the same place she’d been before the apocalypse had begun. Gideon hadn’t even _mentioned_ the trip. Hadn’t complained about how tired she must have been, or what looking for food and shelter must have been like. How many other travellers she’d met, and how many she’d had to fight. What she’d lost. Whether _she_ had gotten lost, and if she had left her friends Camilla and Palamedes behind, or what that must have cost her if she did. If she missed them. She hadn’t said any of it, and there was plenty to tell.

She’d simply risked it. All of it, for her. For Harrow, and part of her knew why. The other part understood and assured herself that her reasoning was incorrect and Gideon Nav did _not_ possess any personal attachment to Harrowhark Nonagesimus, and she relaxed at the comfort of those words. A final part said that no, not even that, because this was a lie and Gideon Nav was dead and her spirit had come to haunt Harrow just to tease her with the life she might have had had she not been a coward. What she could have had had she _thought,_ just for once in her life, about what it was she might have wanted, and whether it stood before her or not.

She was real. Harrow didn’t know what that meant.

Gideon opened her eyes. Moonlight streamed in through the windows behind Harrow, but this side of the living room was mostly dark, Harrow shielding her from what light she could have used to discern Gideon’s expression. Her eyes were hollows of shadows. She didn’t move, didn’t shift, didn’t speak, and Harrow wondered if Gideon had known she was there the entire time. Harrow dropped her hand. She left.

“Shoot it,” Harrow urged. Gideon’s hand flexed on the grip but she otherwise remained still, eyes on the yard. Harrow had seen the deer from the attic and called softly down the stairs for Gideon to grab the rifle. She’d been expecting danger when she’d stepped onto the porch, Harrow on her heels, but had frozen at the sight of the deer in the yard. There wasn’t really anything massively _wrong_ with shooting the deer, Gideon knew, especially as they’d been living off of canned fruits and vegetables for the last of the early winter months, and she was dying for some sort of real food, but was caught by surprise anyway as the deer lifted its head, slender neck extending to nearly her height, jagged antlers silver under bright moonlight spilling from above. It turned at the sound of Harow’s voice, unafraid, and Gideon realized it probably thought it had nothing to fear. There simply weren’t enough people around for it to register them as dangerous— they were a curiosity, nothing more. Her hand relaxed on the grip.

“Fuck, Griddle,” Harrow said, breaking her stillness. She snatched the gun out of Gideon’s hands and shoved her asive with her hip— which didn’t do much, because Harrow was, like, five foot nothing— propped it on her shoulder, lowered her head to sight it, and shot.

The backfire was more than she expected, though Gideon knew she’d used the rifle before. It sent her back a step further than she could balance, shoulders hitting Gideon’s hands. She steadied her, eyes on the fallen deer, and missed the look of surprise Harrow shot her.

“Good one,” she muttered. It was true; felled with one clean shot, a dark lump on the grass. Gideon swallowed and lifted her hands from Harrow’s shoulders.

“I don’t know how to cook,” Gideon said, distantly. Harrow turned the safety back on and dropped the rifle with a clatter. She gave Gideon a curious look, then, dark eyes searching her for a moment before she spoke.

“I’ll teach you.”

And suddenly, Harrow was back at the beginning.

Long story short: Harrow fucked up. She’d done it before and she would do it again, but this— acknowledging that Gideon wasn’t leaving and in some ways accepting her presence (not by choice, Gideon was just stubborn and Harrow got used to it, as much as she hated it)— was the third time she’d made this mistake, and the second of which that was centered around Gideon, but it wasn’t like she had a _choice._ The problem was Harrow, and Harrow’s problem was that she took people down with her. She had a way of dragging people into the tiny sliver of the universe that she called her own, clutched tightly to her chest, bleeding fingers tight over sharp edges. No one would take it from her, and no one would leave. When she fell, they did too, and she made it their problem through her presence.

It started a long time ago— she had a mother, once, and then she didn’t and Harrow sat alone on the edge of a bare bed in a bleak home, knees tucked up under her chin, and Harrow vowed she wouldn’t take anyone down with her. It was the second loneliness— jagged and broken, hollow and afraid, and she’d never return.

And she didn’t. She let it overtake her, and then she was alone. That was the first time.

The second was after Harrow had finally gotten accustomed to the simplicity of that life, when this annoying other kid popped into her life and wouldn’t get the fuck out. She was always Right There and entirely in Harrow’s space, and her sole purpose seemed to be to _annoy._ And she was good at it, Harrow grudgingly had to admit. Good at slipping through the cracks, too, because Harrow learned to hate her (well that was what she called it, anyway, even though it could’ve been something closer to _extreme distaste_ at that age). And that was really what scared her, because hate meant human and human meant breakable.

See, there’s a fourth type of quiet that a lot of people pretend not to know, and Harrow pretended to prefer. It was silent, hearing people on the outside of her universe and frantically insulating the walls to keep them out. Hearing the rustle as they brushed up against the edges of the bubble she trapped herself inside, humming energy burning bright and just out of reach. It was barriers and hiding and waiting, biding her time, forcing back whatever it was that might have cracked her armor (no cracks in the armor because armor was a reminder that there was a body underneath, red and bleeding, filled with pain and suffering and shattered shards in her hands).

The universe was hers, and she dragged people down until Gideon rolled her eyes and popped the bubble universe with something sharp— a jab, a remark, one of those idiotic puns Harrow hated so much that she might just explode over one day— and reached in and pulled Harrow out. The outside fucking sucked. Harrow hated her for it.

Then she had a blissful year alone where she Absolutely Did Not think about how tired she was. How quiet everything had become, and how she’d realized that having nothing was worse than having something, no matter what the something was. She ignored desire and curiosity and whatever that base instinct was that reached a clawed hand up from inside her, dredging up the deepest bits of the memories she’d long buried, fueling whatever it was that made up the heat that had been there, once. But Harrow had taken matters into her own hands and smashed red on the floor long before anyone else could try to, so it didn’t even matter anyway.

And Gideon came back without blood on her hands, simply appeared and looked at life and love and loathe and revenge on Harrow’s hands and shrugged and said she’d stay. 

Gideon woke to an explosion. Quite literally, it seemed, as Harrow had just fired a shot outside. Gideon threw off her blanket and ran outside, heart pounding. The screen door slammed behind her in time with another _bang._ She made the mistake of grabbing the barrel of the rifle when she reached Harrow, burning metal searing into her palms and sparking electricity through her wrists, all but obliterating whatever need for ‘touch’ she might have. She grit her teeth and kept her hand there, yanking it out of Harrow’s hands.

“What the fuck are you doing?” Gideon asked. Her eyes narrowed on what had caught Harrow’s attention. Two figures knelt in the corn, wispy hair matching that of the stalks, wide eyes dark in the moonlight. She couldn’t see much else— not with the bonfire and half the property stretching between them. It was obvious why they’d come; she and Harrow had spent all day first figuring out how to and then prepping the venison for winter. The apocalypse sucked for vegetarians, apparently, but that applied to neither of them nor their ghosts in the field.

“It’s _our_ food, Griddle,” Harrow protested, reaching for the rifle. The handgun was inside, but Gideon hoped she wouldn’t think of it then. “I’ll not give it away to strangers that appear out of the fields past sundown.”

“It’s not unreasonable to share,” someone called from afar, their reedy voice airy on the wind. “Besides, how would we even know it’s yours?”

“Finders, keepers,” another voice trailed, this one slightly lower.

“It’s ours,” Harrow shouted. “Get the fuck out of here.”

“Woah, what? Why?” Gideon cut in, frowning at the field. “It’s not like we have a real freezer, and we can’t eat it all. They’ll leave us alone if we do—”

“They’ll leave us alone or I’ll shoot them.”

“—and why not help them? C’mon, it’s like, two meals.” Gideon raised an eyebrow. “Don’t be a dick.”

Harrow’s eyes darkened. She straightened, and just when Gideon thought Harrow was about to kick her off the porch, Harrow turned on her heel and marched inside. She snatched the rifle from Gideon’s hand as she passed.

“If she attacks you, I’m shooting. I don’t care who I hit.”

On that note, Gideon took a generous portion of the venison they’d cooked, wrapped in cloth because plastic was _long_ gone, and descended the stairs. She walked past the fire they’d built, still roaring, and stopped in the driveway halfway between the fire and the edge of the field. The figure, crouched between corn stalks, rose fluidly. Her hair was the same color as the fields, pale gold and falling to her waist. She looked sickly, as did most people these days, brittle bones and paper-thin skin. She stepped elegantly out of the field, onto the grass, and Gideon pictured Harrow’s indignance: flared nostrils, clenched jaw, and narrowed eyes, ready to bite or claw or scratch at the attacker— whatever it took to get her _away._ She wasn’t the most sociable, her Harrow Nonagesimus.

The stranger walked forward, silent. She stopped a few feet away from Gideon, studying her with wide silvery eyes. Violet swam beneath their surface, faded like the rest of her, as if some essential part had been drained away. Gideon held out the food between them. When she stepped forward, Gideon caught a closer look at her— the angle of her jaw, the slope of her shoulders and thin wrists, fingernails ringed with dirt and grime. She held herself differently that one would expect, loose and disconnected though she has the form of a dancer, and that has Gideon saying—

“I know you.”

The stranger raised her chin. She looked down her nose at Gideon, daring her to say more, and she does.

“You’re that barista!” she exclaimed. “Yeah, on 3rd Avenue, what was it called— something about that sea guy? You worked the morning shift, right?”

She dropped her hand to her side and straightened, taking in a slow breath like she was gathering the courage to speak to a naive, insufferable child.

“Your order made me desire death by descent into the sun’s center after burning in the desert for three eons without shade nor water,” she proclaimed. “I would rather cut off my right hand than make it again, and so be it I shall if I am required to again.”

Gideon said, “Oh.”

Harrow didn’t have to shoot, after all. Standing on the porch, watching the two women retreat back to wherever the hell they’d come from, Gideon said, teasing and more than a little smug—

“You think I’m alright, don’t you?”

Harrow stiffened. She said, without turning to face Gideon, “I honest to god, cross my heart and hope to die, pinky swear, and whatever fuck-all options there are, promise that I actually, legitimately, fucking hate you.”

“Aw, sugar.” Gideon flipped up her glasses to see her better, smiling cheesily. “You’ll come around.”

“Harrow,” Gideon said, deadly serious. Her eyes were on the horizon; Harrow followed her gaze across clear spring blue to billowing clouds of black smoke splitting the sky. They were at the edge of the city where they’d started that season’s garden a few weeks back, near one of the few places with a water pump. They’d given up going separately by that point, instead going together to stab at the dirt and try to coax the tiniest amounts of food from the rocky soil and having in general not a damn clue what they were doing. It was a little easier when Gideon got to laugh at Harrow cursing the soil, and Harrow didn’t hide her scoff when Gideon tripped into the thorny rose bush at the edge of the garden last week (which was the single thing that thrived in this climate, and the one plant that didn’t actually help them with anything). They’d stabbed it to death several times, but it was stronger than either of them, apparently, and kept growing back.

 _“Harrow,”_ Gideon said again, because she hadn’t responded, and pointed like there was anything else but the burning house and everything she had inside it turning to ash that she’d be concerned with.

“Fuck,” Harrow said quietly, and repeated it again, louder. She dropped the vine she was holding and stood. There were miles— two and a half, to be exact— between them and the house, and the plume of smoke was already three times as tall as the house itself. Gideon appeared beside her, eyes wide.

“Go,” she said, and they ran.

Harrow walked through the empty house alone, kicking at the shells of what had been everything she’d had. She’d long gotten used to the bloody shards in her hands, trailing over her wrists and down her forearms, dripping to the ground to smear underneath her feet. That pain was bearable, if it wasn’t hers, but this was something of her own that she hadn’t known for a long time.

It was empty.

Harrow wasn’t supposed to be an empty person— not by design, no one was. She’d been born with emotion and energy and everything else, all bright and exciting and burning the world to pieces. Eventually, it had all turned to ash, but that wasn’t her fault. The point was, the pain was there, whether she liked it or not. It was always something, and it was always a companion that walked beside her.

This?

This was nothing.

Just. Absence where there should have been a house and everything she had— everything she’d _built_ , because it wasn’t like this was even her house, but was hers and she would’ve held it forever if she could have. Someone had reached inside her and taken down all the supports holding her skull up inside her head, keeping it from falling on the soft parts of her brain that weren’t supposed to be touched. Someone took the support and the structures, and burned it to ash.

So when the dust settled, Harrow’s stomach twisted and her chest ached and something rushed between her ears and behind her eyes. She saw the house, and she saw her hands, and the blood dripping from them, and thought—

_I was supposed to be the breaker._

“Anything?” Gideon called. Harrow, standing in the middle of the ruins, shook her head. The ceiling above her was cracked and charred, sunlight streaming through where the second story had caved away in sections, dust and ash drifting slowly to the ground. There hadn’t been anything they could do by the time they arrived but move what had been on the porch, which hadn’t been much. The house had burned into the early hours of the morning, and only late the next afternoon had they deemed it relatively safe to search. Harrow shook her head slowly. She was shaking, slightly, though out of anger or the sheer unfairness of it all she wasn’t sure.

“Well?” Gideon asked, picking her way across the ruins to her. She pushed her hair out of her face, leaving a streak of ash along her temple.

 _“Well,”_ Harrow stressed bitterly. “I don’t have a fucking house.”

“Duh.” At Harrow’s withering glare she sighed. “Ok, yeah, that sucks, but we can just go catch Cam and Palamedes.”

“Who?”

“I mean, the wallpaper here _was_ kind of shit,” Gideon continued, knowing Harrow knew who her friends were. “And that door squeaked.”

“I’m not coming with you.”

“And really, walking five miles a day was not it.”

“Griddle.”

“Though it’s a lot more than five to Cam’s place.”

_“Gideon.”_

_“Harrow._ Jesus, can you just shut up for once and just come with?”

That gave her pause. Come with? To where? To _what?_ Something with Gideon in her life— Gideon who she still hated in some way even though she was a part of her more than anything else had ever been in her life. She didn’t respond.

“I’ll leave you behind, Griddle, I swear,” Harrow shouted from the road. She had one hand on the cart, the other shielding her eyes from the coming sunrise, waiting. Gideon stepped through the front door (quite literally, as it was just the frame now with the screen in crumbled dust at its base) and down the porch steps. There really had been nothing left after the fire, the barest scraps of charred food and what they’d had with them at the garden. It was all in the cart, now, and Harrow was itching to leave before whoever had started the fire came back. Gideon maintained that it was an accident or some shit luck, but Harrow’s paranoia had crept under her skin and she’d agreed earlier was better.

So they were leaving, but the mutual kind where someone wasn’t leaving Harrow and she wasn’t leaving them. Gideon figured she and Palamedes would get into more fights than anyone could handle, but that was later and this was now. Now the cart was squeaking down the road and Harrow wasn’t looking back, but she’d catch up, and maybe the trip wouldn’t be so lonely this time.

“Good riddance,” she said to the house and the walls and the surprisingly less than shit year she’d spent there, and ran to catch Harrow.

**Author's Note:**

> i should be jailed for the legitimate crime of there not being any meme refs in this but the only tiktok (not even vine i know) i could think of while writing this was: *crying* why is my bonk filter on?
> 
> shout at me on twitter @xandrillia if u want :)


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